BIOS virii are as old as flash BIOS chips. In the early days, I continued to use clocked 286 s in preference to 3/486 s because most had non-volatile BIOSes (no battery backing). There are plenty of ('doze) utilities for interrogating the BIOS on the InterWeb - nothing new there. I've been using some of them to force settings not provided in the truncated access provided by the suppliers via the DEL key. Ten years ago, every kiddie knew how to clock their cr*p (esp Phoenix) BIOS on their proprietary boxes. The bigggggggest problem remains education, education, education. We must stop Americans, in particular, buying proprietary boxes - it degrades knowledge acquisition about the tools they use. It's deliberate, it's leverage - they know what criminals like eg bankers and M$ do to ruin their nation but education has been so bad over there that they persist with blind stupidity and indolence for the sake of lifting a little screwdriver. Building PC s should be taught in schools alongside the evils of capitalism.

I've yet to encounter a BIOS infected virus. Corrupted ones due to virus attack, yes many times a long time ago. The ones that gets corrupted I've seen nowadays are due to user's own doing (with the help of manufacturer's auto-update) or due to a malfunction.

There's many ways to look at the bios. Flashing bios updates tools and setting modifications tools are aplenty. Patching tools are hard to come by but still available if you really want them. I normally don't "patch" them unless I need something specific.

I dare say that I'm the least worried about bios infected virus. Most of the nt based systems under my watch don't even use antivirus ... Downtime ? None was due to viruses ...

"The LinuxBIOS project has published a paper on using the open source bios code from bochs to help boot unmodified OSes such as Windows 2000, which was presented at the recent Usenix Conference. This was mentioned previously on Slashdot, but this paper gives more technical details on how they did it, some details about future possibilities, and their guiding philosophies behind this project."

Most likely somewhere on or at or in those texts links there are info on how to dump the BIOS of our machines and then use tools in linux to compare them with the original BIOS and change them back to the default?_________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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